Little Miss Sunshine: The Shooting Script


Michael Arndt - 2006
    Brazenly satirical yet deeply human, Little Miss Sunshine introduces audiences to one of the most endearingly fractured families in recent cinema history. Meet the Hoovers, a motley six-member family who treks from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, California, to fulfill the deepest wish of seven-year-old Olive, an ordinary little girl with big dreams.Starring Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin, Paul Dano, and Alan Arkin, the film strikes a nerve with everyone who's ever been awestruck by how their muddled families seem to make it after all. On the way the family must deal with crushed dreams, heartbreak, and a broken-down VW bus, leading up to the surreal Little Miss Sunshine competition itself. On their travels through this bizarrely funny landscape, the Hoovers learn to trust and support each other along the path of life, no matter what the challenge.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape


Steven Soderbergh - 1990
    Illustrated.

Isn't it Romantic


Wendy Wasserstein - 1998
    Both are struggling to escape from lingering parental domination and to establish their own lives and identities. In Janie's case this leads to an inconclusive involvement with a young Jewish doctor who calls her "Monkey"; while Harriet assails the world of big business and has an affair with her hard-driving (and married) boss. Told in a fast-moving series of inventive, alternately hilarious and touchingly revealing scenes, the play explores their parallel stories with uncommon wit and wisdom-resulting, ultimately, in a heightened awareness which, while not providing all the answers, goes a long way toward achieving the maturity and self-assuredness that both protagonists so desperately desire.

The Counselor: A Screenplay


Cormac McCarthy - 2013
    But this is no ordinary screenplay. This is a work of extraordinary imagination which draws on many of the themes of McCarthy's work as well as taking it to new dark places. It is also written with great descriptive passages counteracting the dialogue, so the reader is given the full experience of the McCarthy prose. It is the story of a lawyer, the Counselor, a man who is so seduced by the desire to get rich, to impress his fiancée Laura, that he becomes involved in a drug-smuggling venture that quickly takes him way out of his depth. His contacts in this are the mysterious and probably corrupt Reiner and the seductive Malkina, so exotic her pets of choice are two cheetahs. As the action crosses the Mexican border, things become darker, more violent and more sexually disturbing than the Counselor has ever imagined.

Clerks & Chasing Amy


Kevin Smith - 1997
    Clerks was the independent film success story of 1994, winning the Prix de la Jeunesse and the International Critics Week Award at Cannes, and the Filmmakers' Trophy at Sundance. Set in the everyday world of a New Jersey QuickStop and its adjacent video store, the film revolves around the obsessions, love lives, and friendships of the clerks. Janet Maslin of the New York Time called it "a buoyant comedy...and exuberant display of ingenuity," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times raves, "Clerks is boisterous and irreverently funny...an example of what is best and most hopeful about the American independent film scene."

The Mother and The Father


Florian Zeller - 2015
    Years later, spending hours alone, Anne convinces herself that her husband is having an affair. If only her son were to break-up with his girlfriend. He would return home and come down for breakfast. She would put on her new red dress and they would go out. The Mother, in this English translation by Christopher Hampton, was commissioned by the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath, and premiered in May 2015. Florian Zeller's The Mother was awarded the Moliere Award for Best Play 2011.The Father, in this English translation by Christopher Hampton, was commissioned by the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath and premiered in October 2014. The production transferred to the Tricycle Theatre, London, in May 2015. Florian Zeller's The Father was awarded the Moliere Award for Best Play 2014.

Another Part of the Forest


Lillian Hellman - 1948
    Marcus Hubbard, rich, despotic and despised, made a fortune during the Civil War by running the blockade and worse. In his family life he is equally injurious: one son he bulldozes while the other he holds in contempt for his frailty. By Marcus's side stands his mentally deranged wife and, finally, Regina, the adored daughter amoral, conniving, and beautiful as an evil flower. Marcus, it would seem, has been on the top of the heap long enough and someone must depose him. Turning the tables on a tyrant has always made for high drama, and when Hellman puts her brilliant talents to work on such a theme the result is a play of great theatrical intensity.

The Royal Tenenbaums


Wes Anderson - 2002
    There were three extraordinary children in the Tenenbaum family; Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller) was a financial expert and started buying real estate in his early teens; Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow) was an acclaimed playwright and won a Pulitzer Prize in the 9th grade; Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) was a champion tennis player ranked 2nd in the world by the age 17. They were brilliant. They were famous. They were unlucky enough to be the children of a man named Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman). Now for the first time in 25 years, they're all living together under the same roof. After having largely gone their separate ways they're looking to mend fences--and themselves in the process.

The Hours


David Hare - 2002
    Dalloway -- a postmodern masterpiece whose minimal action takes place on a single June day in postwar London. The Hours progresses in fuguelike fashion: First we meet Clarissa Vaughan, a New York book editor dubbed "Mrs Dalloway" by her longtime friend and former lover Richard. Next, Cunningham presents Woolf herself, beginning work in 1923 on what is to become Mrs. Dalloway. And finally we are introduced to Laura Brown, a California housewife who is avidly reading Woolf's novel. Scenes from these three narratives are presented in recurrent identical succession: "Mrs. Dalloway," Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Brown -- all bristling with connections and startling parallels. The "Mrs. Dalloway" strand is particularly rich, filled as it is with one-to-one correspondences to Woolf's novel. But the deepest and most important thing that The Hours shares with Mrs. Dalloway is "the feeling," as Woolf called it, "that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." Cunningham's three women proceed through the day, through the hours, trying to keep themselves psychologically intact, like someone carrying a glass of water filled to the brim through a crowd and endeavoring not to spill it. They hesitate before plunging into the day because they know how hard it is to live in the world and remain identical with oneself. And they puzzle over a universal dilemma: how to bring the self into the world without its getting broken in the process. In The Hours, Michael Cunningham has explored this dilemma with an impressive and moving subtlety worthy of his great precursor. Benjamin Kunkel

Chinatown


Robert Towne - 1998
    Jake Gittes is a successful 'bedroom dick': a private eye specialising in cases of marital infidelity. Paradoxically he might also be the last truly ethical man in a corrupt town. Lured into an investigation of the death-by-drowning of City Water Commissioner Hollis Mulwray, Gittes gets more than usually entwined with his new client, Mulwray's enigmatic widow Evelyn. He then finds himself crossing swords with Evelyn's redoubtable father, the aging business magnate Noah Cross, who has professional and personal reasons of his own for wanting both Hollis and Evelyn silenced.Academy Award-winner for Best Original Screenplay of 1974, Robert Towne's Chinatown is widely regarded as the finest American movie script of the post-war years. Complex in narrative design, infused with the sordid real-life history of Los Angeles' economic growth and unmistakably adult in its updating of the trademark violence and sexual intrigue of film noir, on the page Chinatown still shines - and cuts - like a blade.

Death


Woody Allen - 1975
    Kleinman, a logical man in a mad world, is indecisive and insecure; he doesn't want to get involved but everyone is after him to make a choice. He is even accused of being the culprit. When Kleinman confronts the maniac (who looks no different from anyone els

Before Sunrise & Before Sunset: Two Screenplays


Richard Linklater - 2005
    They are immediately attracted. Despite knowing this may be the only time they will see each other, in the next few hours in the city of Vienna, they share everything and promise to meet again.    Nearly a decade later, Jesse, now a novelist on a publicity tour, sees Celine in a bookstore in Paris. Again their time is short, and they spend it reestablishing the connection they experienced on their first meeting. Romantic, poignant, understated, and often profound, these two screenplays are sure to become classics in their own right.

Boogie Nights


Paul Thomas Anderson - 1998
    Deprived of love and respect from his family, Eddie is renamed 'Dirk Diggler' and conquers the world of porn, but manages to retain his essential innocence. As the turbulent seventies shade into the hedonistic eighties, Dirk's career goes into a tailspin; but he is rescued by the safety net of the extended family fostered by hard-core movie director Jack Horner.Paul Thomas Anderson's screenplay is exemplary in its ability to interweave the stories of its large cast of characters. In accord with the wisdom of the Roman dramatist Terence (who claimed, 'Nothing human is alien to me'), Anderson has engaged with a side of life widely considered to be irredeemably sleazy, and has mined humour, sadness and compassion out of his unlikely subject matter.

Taxi Driver


Paul Schrader - 1975
    When his tentative efforts at a relationship with elegant political campaign worker Betsy come to naught, Travis conceives of an assassination attempt upon her boss, Senator Charles Palantine. But as he cruises the streets at night, Travis encounters a hapless child prostitute, Iris, and her sinister pimp, sport. Travis's mounting psychosis acquires a new focus, and violence erupts . . .One of the key films of the 1970s and winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, Taxi Driver was the first of several potent collaborations between Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese. Inspired by Ford's The Searchers, Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, the diaries of real-life gunman Arthur Bremer, and an especially tormented period in Schrader's own life, Taxi Driver remains a devastating portrait of a man in urban purgatory.

Laundry and Bourbon


James McLure - 1981
    Book by McLure, James